I'll Be Watching You. M. William Phelps
up and raked her long fingernails across his face. (“I gouged his eyes as hard as I could.”) It was as if her arm had moved on its own. (“I didn’t even have to will it—it just happened.”)
Mary Ellen never yelled or screamed. It was something she had learned not to do: “Usually when I’m frightened, I’m very quiet…. I kind of freeze.”
Not this time, though. This time, Mary Ellen reacted in a violent way toward the man who was trying to kill her: “I knew I was fighting for my life. I tell people now,” Mary Ellen said, “you have no idea of the strength you have and how quickly your mind can work when it’s about your survival.”
17
I
No sooner had Mary Ellen managed to gouge Ned in the eyes and rip the skin on his face open, when he jumped off her and ran out of the room.
The entrance door to the building was still dead-bolted.
As she got off the bed, Mary Ellen fell on the floor. Pulling herself up, she ran as fast as she could out of her apartment. She was weak. Sluggish. She had blood all over her skirt and blouse (which was torn and hanging down below her waist), but she didn’t realize she was bleeding. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, Mary Ellen went straight for her landlady’s door. She was definitely home.
Her keys to safety were still upstairs in her pocketbook.
Near the bottom of the stairs, with several steps to go, Mary Ellen fell and tumbled down the last few stairs. Bleeding and bruised, she basically fell onto the landlady’s doorstep. (“My mind obviously couldn’t deal with the pain at that time; I was too busy staying alive.”)
Now Mary Ellen started yelling: “Come on…open the door,” she screamed as loud as she could.
By this point, after hearing the commotion going on above her, Mary Ellen’s landlady had already made the trip to her door to see what was going on. Unbeknownst to Mary Ellen, or Ned, the landlady had called the police. Waiting for them to arrive, she was standing on the opposite side of the door to Mary Ellen, asking, “What is it?” Her words were muffled through the solid oak door. “What’s happening out there? Go away!”
“Please, please,” Mary Ellen said, “open the door. Please open the door. He’s killing me. Please open the door.”
This was the first time Mary Ellen saw the blood. She looked down toward her abdomen and blood was streaming out of two slits in her midsection. It was gushing, she remembered, so she put her hand over the wounds and continued pleading with the landlady to unlock the door. “Please…hurry….”
Mary Ellen was trapped. She couldn’t return to her own apartment. For all she knew, he was still inside, regrouping, gathering his strength after being seriously injured in the eyes—and getting ready to finish the job he had started. It wasn’t hard to figure out that he had to kill her now. She was a witness. If she lived, he was going to jail.
II
Standing at the door, jiggling the doorknob, was a strange feeling for Mary Ellen. After getting no response from the landlady, Mary Ellen stepped a few feet back and then threw herself against the door.
But it wouldn’t budge.
After that, she pummeled her shoulder against the door, but her strength was dwindling. At this point, her landlady screamed, “Who is it? What’s going on out there? What’s happening? Who’s there?”
“Please…open the…door,” Mary Ellen said, her words falling short. She was out of breath. Losing blood. Weak. Everything slowing down.
Then she’d get a bit of energy back and become frantic, pleading with her landlady.
During this moment, she had her back turned toward the stairs leading up to her apartment. She had no idea where Ned was or if he was still in the apartment. But as she continued pleading with the landlady, she felt a hand come from around her back and cover her mouth. And then he spoke for what was the first time since the ordeal had begun.
“Be quiet,” Ned whispered in Mary Ellen’s ear. “We have to go back upstairs.”
Mary Ellen’s eyes widened. She couldn’t believe it. Hearing Ned whisper in her ear like that was one of the weirdest feelings Mary Ellen said she’d ever had in her life. Ned had said it in a way that made her think he believed she was a willing participant in it all. She felt as though he was playing a game and he believed that she liked it.
“Let’s go. Don’t say anything,” he said.
III
It wasn’t once or twice that Ned had violent thoughts of rendering females unconscious in order to sexually arouse and stimulate himself. He admitted later that it was “every time I look at or talk to a female.”
Every time.
Living inside his head for thirty years or more, Ned added later, were these images of women disabled by the violence he had perpetrated for the sole purpose of sexual gratification. He wrote how he would mentally rehearse this scenario dozens of times a day. He’d sit and think about how to do it. He’d drive around in his car and go through it, over and over. He’d pull up to a stoplight, see a nice-looking female in a car next to him, and imagine that she was lying naked from the waist up on a bed or couch, unconscious, indisposed, there for his pleasure. It was such an inherent part of his consciousness that, by one point in his teens and college years, he would go out of his way, he wrote, miss a party, stay up until the wee hours of the night, to see a movie like Psycho (the shower scene), Frenzy, No Way to Treat a Lady…The Boston Strangler, or any James Bond film where at least one beautiful spy is killed….
Beauty and death. For Ned, they were like chocolate and peanut butter.
Ned was not an uneducated man. He wasn’t incapable of knowing that these thoughts were abnormal. These fantasies he had, he hadn’t told anyone about them.
Nor had he sought treatment.
In a way, I guess we can say, Ned liked these thoughts.
In one letter to a judge, Ned wondered what it would be like to have an EKG machine monitoring [his] heart rate while he sat and viewed some of the films in which women were killed. Alone with a female, he admitted, these thoughts were all that consumed his mind. Ninety-nine out of a hundred times, he wrote, he could contain himself. But it was that one time, he said, when he couldn’t manage the urge, that usually got him into trouble. Unfortunately for Mary Ellen, tonight she was that 1 percent.
IV
After demanding that she be quiet, Ned tried pulling Mary Ellen up the stairs back toward her apartment. He needed to finish the job. She could identify him. She knew where he worked. His name. What he looked like. If she lived, there was no getting out of this.
Mary Ellen wasn’t about to give up now, not after all she had done to survive. Her landlady wasn’t going to open the door, however. She was possibly too scared or just didn’t want to get involved. The old woman had no idea, of course, that a maniac was on the opposite side of the door trying to kill her tenant.
Or maybe she did.
Either way, as Ned tried forcing Mary Ellen up the stairs, she managed to scratch him in the eyes again.
He winced. Went down. Put his hands over his face.
“Who’s there with you?” the landlady asked.
Mary Ellen yelled, “Help me…open the door!”
“Be quiet,” she heard Ned say again.
“Help me…open the door.”
“Who’s there with you?”
Ned kept grabbing at Mary Ellen, but he kept losing his grip because of all the blood.
When he realized he wasn’t going to be able to pull her up the stairs, Ned ran up the stairs by himself back into the apartment.
A